Met with Mike West and Katherine Inge from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia yesterday.
They have been working with organisations on telework projects which started about 6 to 7 years ago.
They ran these as pilot projects looking at what made a good home working teleworker, looking at the characteristics of a teleworker.
They did a survey on businesses in their local area to find out what policies and procedures they currently have in place around flexible working allowing employees to work from home. They ran a placement project with about 100 placements, a large percentage of these being veterans.
They raised the awareness of teleworking – pointing out that even now employers see teleworking as a reward to employees rather than being a necessity.
They carried out telework assessments, a process of vetting people to see how their typing skills and communications skills qualified, testing them on their telephone skills, customer service skills etc.
Katherine had more involvement on the self employment side and mentioned the ‘Self Employment Grant’ which was made available through the Office Disability and Policy Dept which was trialled throughout New York, Alaska and Florida.
The availability of Developed Start-up Projects – whereby interested people looking at going self employed can still receive Social Security Work Incentive payments and put money aside separately to save towards starting a new business while staying on benefits.
Katherine suggested that we pull together case studies showing the different processes/services/projects we work on for clients, what the procedure is, how long each piece of work takes, showing specifically what can be achieved. This in turn could be used as a PR marketing piece to raise awareness of home working virtual assistance and teleworking.
Mike and Katherine provided us with a fantastic pack to take away including:
• Video on ‘Self Employment – Start-up in the USA’
• Start-up resource documents on self employment
• A mentor guide to Increase Customized Employment Outcomes through T-TAP
• Business, Disability and Employment – corporate Models of Success
• VCU – Rehabilitation Research and Training Centre on Workplace Supports and Job Retention
Both Mike and Katherine provided us with some great contacts: The Midwest Institute of Telecommuting - http://www.mite.org/ and Expiditor Corporation - http://www.expeditercorp.com/.
Definitely wish to keep in touch with Mike and Katherine as a great source of continuous development in this area.
Where we will be visiting in the USA
